IRL (In Real Life), there are people who have been staggeringly accurate about mapping the future. One of my favorite examples of this talent is found in Arthur C. Clarke's ‘Profiles of the Future’ written in 1958.
This book lays out the future, decade by decade, grouping the expected technological breakthroughs by field while musing on the general societal impacts of said tech. This sort of brainstorming which dives into the next-order implications of innovation is one of the cornerstones of the frameworks of future studies and foresight strategy previously referred to.
For the most part, Arthur’s predictions hold up and track surprisingly well for being 63 years old. It starts to detour when we slowed our pursuit of space-based exploration dramatically after the 80s however thanks to a booming private space sector we’re slowly getting back onto the predicted and exciting path.
More troubling are the dystopian science fictions mapping to current events unfolding in real-time, I’m looking at you George Orwell, and Aldous Huxley. Weren’t these tales meant to be cautionary, not instruction guides?
I’ve always preferred the more utopian sci-fi landscapes like Star Trek, imagined by Gene Roddenberry. I think it’s harder to imagine a world where we resolve our differences, solve our problems, create enough abundance that we’re able to tackle exploring the wider universe together. Perhaps we will still get there, but at this point, I would take a George Lucasian Star Wars-type future, it ain't perfect but it could be fun.
Reality is in the eye of the beholder
When I look at my past almost decade of writing these blog posts, it’s fun to go back and see what I got right and what I got wrong, also looking at the situation with years of hindsight helps put things into a new perspective.
We should pay attention to people who are accurate at forecasting the future. After all, if they've proven that they can see reality objectively enough to predict outcomes, they may also hold other key insights that could prove vital to reaching our next milestone.
I’ve been both right and wrong but overall it looks like I have a good grip on what’s happening with the intersection of media, business, and technology, these are my lanes. If you read my previous 3 part series piece from almost a decade ago on the changing media you would see I forecasted the coming discrepancy between what the evening news would present and what the people themselves would find topical and relevant (https://www.alexanderkline.com/2013/09/30/the-age-of-transparency-part-one-changing-media/).
Perception of the world informs what we create
I didn't anticipate how the corporate press would cling onto the last of its subscribers by playing to their most visceral fears. I didn’t know that technology behemoths would use algorithmic control of information to decide what reality you would experience on social media and control high traffic search results.
Traditional media’s raison d’etre changed with the times from a functional press core with investigative journalism and challenging questions to a click-based money-hungry, an attention-starved survival mode that needed to compete for air with fringe blogs ( like this one ) and everyday influencers that could leverage the internet to pry huge swaths of the audience away from the old fashioned media channels, like the good old evening news.
Between a media fighting for relevance and massive tech companies with more power than some governments, we’re experiencing an intersection of the traditional media’s commercial need for attention and an audience already overwhelmed by information, lending them to low attention spans. This all combines to give us a very shallow and myopic view of the world. A view that’s reinforced by your own biases, and comprised of the media's financial interests.
Spoiler alert, they’ve figured out how to use your psychology against you.
Of course, none of this is particularly unique in insight. But how deep and pervasive these issues have become are not well known, discussed, or on the minds of the people consuming the data. If you were worried about AI controlling humans in the future, it’s already here, just not the way you would have imagined.
Matrix Alpha version
When you see, hear, and click on the same articles and stories that you heard on the tv, pushed to your phone’s news app, on the radio during your commute, reshared on social media, then become the topic of conversation at the water cooler, you’ve just experienced a reality feedback loop. A story, true or false is not part of the public consciousness, it’s taken on a life of its own.
In this way, a story, whether weighted or not, one of journalistic integrity or not, past its expiry date, is permeated into your life. It becomes part of your reality by being spoken into existence rather than a state of reality being observed by you, rarely being analyzed and reported back to you with varying levels of objectivity, or well-disclosed subjectivity.
Even worse, often there is often one supreme narrative masquerading as objective reality, and opposing or questioning this could have you accused of having a “bad take” at best, accused of wrong-think, or “canceled” at worse.
What’s the solution to this? We need to stop letting our data feed control us.
It’s a great illusion to think the world fits into our 5 inches of screen, digestible 5 minutes at a time when we’re in the bathroom.
At present, it’s only the loudest voices who are able to take up the most pixel real estate.
A solution is to listen for quiet signals, decentralized ones, and to amplify the signals which find coherence with one another independently. A perfect example would be subscribing to substacks like this one :)
More to ponder on this in the next post.